Telecom conglomerate gets a nod from the European Commission
When we’re talking about advertising, it’s hard to disagree Google is a dominant force. A majority of its revenue comes from serving ads which you’ve no doubt come across all around the Internet. But even as antitrust sentiment around the company swells, it would still take a behemoth effort from enterprise as well as regulators to counter such dominance. Well, it looks like Europe’s biggest telecom companies are willing to give it a try.
Germany’s Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), Spain’s Telefónica (Movistar, O2), United Kingdom’s Vodafone, and France’s Orange have announced that they’re coming together to launch a joint advertising venture (via Reuters). Each of the four groups will have an equal share in the new holding company which will be managed independently — a supervisory board has been established with its members chosen by the shareholders.
According to a joint statement from the venture’s participants, the conglomerate aims to launch an advertising platform for European users that’s built from the ground up to be compliant with the European Union’s stringent online privacy policies such as the ePrivacy Directive and the GDPR.
Vodafone built out the ad platform that the joint venture will be using. The platform has been in testing through Deutsche Telekom as well as Vodafone in Germany over the past year and is set to be tested in Orange and Telefonica’s home markets of France and Spain.
Key features of the technology lets users take control of how they see ads, requiring users to opt into getting communications from brands through publishers, and being able to give or revoke consent at any time through a handy privacy portal. In addition, this platform doesn’t share anything other than a “pseudo-anonymous digital token that cannot be reverse-engineered” — something Google has struggled with in the course of developing a replacement for tracking cookies.
There’s a lot we don’t know about the ins and outs of this technology, but it sure sounds like it might give Google and other advertisers in Big Tech such as Meta a few reasons to worry — at least over in Europe.
